Sanford admits affair

South Carolina GOP Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday to an affair, and resigned his position as chair of the Republican Governor's Association following a strange week in which the governor dropped off the grid and could not be located.

Later in the day, Sanford's wife Jenny released a statement saying the couple had begun a trial separation two weeks ago.

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“I have been unfaithful to my wife. I developed a relationship with what started out as a dear, dear friend from Argentina,” Mark Sanford said in a rambling and often emotional news conference at the state capital in Columbia.

“I’m a bottom line kind of guy I’m just gonna lay it out. It’s gonna hurt and I’m going to let the chips fall where they may,” said Sanford, often touted as a potential 2012 presidential hopeful.

Sanford apologized to his wife and his four children. “To Jenny, anybody who has observed her over the last 20 years of my life knows how closely she has stood by my side in campaign, after campaign, after campaign,” he said.

“I’ve let down a lot of people, and that’s the bottom line,” he said.

Asked if he and his wife had separated, Sanford responded, “I don’t know how you want to define that. She’s there, I’m here.”

“What I did was wrong, period,” he said. “I spent the last five days crying in Argentina.”

Jenny Sanford was much less vague, saying that after learning of her husband's infidelity and first working "to reach reconciliation through forgivness," she had asked her husband to leave earlier this month.

"We reached a point where I felt it was important to look my sons in the eyes and maintain my dignity, self-respect and my basic sense of right and wrong," she said in her statement. "I therefore asked my husband to leave two weeks ago."

Jenny Sanford said the terms of the "short" trial separation called for the governor not to contact his family, so she was unaware of his whereabouts during the past week.

The governor said that his staff did not deserve blame for giving misleading statements about his whereabouts to the press - first that he was off writing and then that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail.

"I apologize to my staff," Sanford said in a statement released after the 2 p.m. news conference. "I misled them about my whereabouts, and as a result the people of South Carolina believed something that wasn't true. I want to make absolutely clear that over the past two days at no time did anyone on my staff intentionally relay false information to other state officials or the public at large. What they've said over the past two days they believed to be true, and I'm sorry to them for putting them in this position."

Soon after the press conference ended, the RGA announced that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour - another potential 2012 candidate for the GOP - would be stepping in to fill Sanford’s previous role as chairman.

“The news revealed today hurts all of us who have gotten to know Governor Sanford over the years and so it is with regret that the RGA accepted Governor Sanford’s resignation as chairman,” Barbour said in a statement. “While this news is deeply disappointing, I also know it’s important to remain focused on the future and Governor Sanford’s resignation allows him and us to do just that.”

Sanford's announcement was the latest twist in a story that began as a mystery but now has turned into a fiasco for Sanford, whose staff provided a series of increasingly confusing cover stories when his whereabouts became the subject of global news coverage.

“I don’t know how this thing got blown out of proportion,” the governor told The State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., after he landed at the Atlanta airport Wednesday morning.

Sanford, a conservative Republican who had a promising future in national politics, is now not only the butt of jokes but has serious questions to answer about the bizarre series of events.